Weight loss systems commonly advance the notion that simply limiting a person's food consumption in relation to their energy expenditure and selecting healthy food options will result in weight loss. Typically, a person's diet is recognized as vital to a person's healthy wellbeing. Yet, despite the importance of weight-loss and overall healthy well-being to most people's lives, current weight loss programs are sorely lacking.
Many recommended diet plans are directed towards the physiological requirements of the average person, or people in general, and do not take into consideration an individual's personal food preferences. Some diet plans that address this need to personalize diet plans to an individual provide a wide array of foods from which the individual may choose. Other diet plans may include a user-conducted survey or questionnaire that prompts the user to answer questions about their food preferences in order to individualize the diet plan.
Unfortunately, these types of diet plans are missing a key component, the subconscious. Aside from physiological needs to consume certain types of nutrients found in foods, there are also psychological factors associated with food selection choices, cravings, feelings of satisfaction/satiation, or alternatively, dissatisfaction or avoidance of certain foods. These psychological factors are fairly complex and, frankly, are not entirely understood by scientists and other professionals. A preference for certain foods and, alternatively, distaste or disgust toward other foods are often determined by an individual's unique personal life experience, such as, the individual's upbringing, personal memories, cultural traditions, etc. Addressing such underlying subconscious factors associated with an individual's food consumption choices can be fairly difficult.
One well-known diet is based on points, wherein point values are assigned to each particular food item. The diet requires that the dieter, when the points are added together, not exceed a certain point value. The points relate to a formula which considers the calories, fat and fiber, and other nutritional elements of the food. The diet allows the dieter to select from a wide-range of pre-packaged foods and also provides point values for known food items available at popular restaurants. However, dieters may be overwhelmed by the wide array of choices and the complexity of counting points for every food item consumed. Additionally, dieters may not be aware of the subconscious factors affecting their food choices and may, therefore, become frustrated and baffled by their conscious decisions to consume foods beyond their allotted point value, or otherwise not meeting the requirements of the diet plan. Addressing only the dieter's conscious decision-making factors, as with conventional dietary plans, leaves out an important component of the dieter's underlying biological and subconscious decision-making processes, setting dieters up for eventual failure.
In order to adhere to a dietary plan on a consistent basis, it is known to provide the dieter with healthy foods that the dieter also enjoys. Unfortunately, like many people, dieters are often unaware of or naive to their personal food preferences. Dieters may make food selection choices based on what is socially or culturally acceptable. For example, the dieter may choose a salad for lunch as a socially acceptable “healthy” food choice. However, such dieter may actually objectively dislike salads; yet, be unaware of or naive to such fact. Accordingly, the dieter may not understand why she is unable to adhere to her dietary plan. A need exists in the weight-loss and dietary plan arts to objectively identify dieters' personal food preferences in order to generate a personalized diet plan that objectively determines dieters' true food preferences based on objective criteria.
Therefore, in spite of the myriad of existing dietary plans, a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above. Namely, a need exists for a system and method for objectively determining a user's personal food preferences for an individualized diet plan.